The Day I Discovered the Beauty of Goal Setting

Growing up, much of our life is spent on someone else’s schedule. Each step of the path is often laid out for us - graduate high school, get a college degree, get a job.  Well intentioned parents, teachers, and mentors usher us down the path well-traveled, helping us become the successes they always hoped we would be. As a result, young people are rarely preoccupied with setting personalized long-term goals. This was certainly the case for me, and it wasn’t until my recent quarter-life crisis that I realized what a powerful catalyst goal-setting can be to living an intentional life.

I Graduated! Now what?

Though often we think of graduation as an arrival, it is more of a departure. Leaving the comfortable road set out for us, it’s time to make the big decisions and embark on our own journey. Personally, after graduating I felt overwhelmed with the options for my future. The actual post-graduation void and the daunting task of job-hunting forced me to come to terms with the reality right in front of me. My future was no longer some distant dream, it was now. There was no syllabus for this. I couldn't see more than three months ahead. The future was a Natasha Bedingfield song (shoutout to my millennials). Apart from feeling terrified, I somehow felt both an unbearable weight of expectation and an immense freedom. I could do anything! But could I?

My dilemma arose from the fact that I had my 'someday dreams', the kind of dreams that feel detached from everyday life, set in the fantasyland of 20-years-from-now. They hung out over me like a mobile over my own little crib of post-graduate complacency. Fun, colorful pictures to look at, to revolve around in my daydreams, but with no real plan or method of reaching them. My “someday dream” was to create films and other cool stuff. I’m passionate about capturing great stories, and envision telling them through documentaries, short videos, and maybe even feature length films. Honestly, all I want is one Oscar. Is that so much to ask?

I started freelancing, but felt aimless without any plan. I decided to wing it, build a body of work, and figure it out as I went. But I felt an increasing unease with my lack of direction. I think a lot of people arrive at this point, and then they get stuck. Without a course of action to reach your dreams, it’s easy to get off track. Most of all I felt the weight of choosing a career that would propel me toward my goals. I didn’t want to jump right into a career and then slowly or never make progress on the true ambitions of my life.

My Breakthrough

My epiphany came from a completely unexpected event - while listening to an athlete speak to a class of first-graders. She challenged them to create and pursue goals in life. She said that everyone needs personal goals, “because if we’re not pursuing our own goals, then we’re pursuing someone else’s. Without goals, we’re going through the motions, letting life happen to us. Without goals we aren’t living an intentional life.” I think that day I needed to hear those words more than those six year olds.

It sounded so simple, and yet so profound. I immediately became angry with myself for not absorbing this sooner. I had always been told to have goals and ambitions and to work towards them, but up until that point my ambitions had been sort of laid out in front of me. Get good grades, land an internship, graduate from college. My own dreams seemed so unspecific and distant. Questions bubbled within me. What did I even want? What would it take to achieve it? Why wasn’t I running harder to get there?

And so that afternoon, I sat down and wrote out a master plan for the next decade of my life. I took my dreams and turned them into goals, and broke those goals down into bite-sized pieces. For the first time since graduating, I could see more than three months into the future. I could feel a palpable life-well-lived forming in front of me. I was filled with hope, vision, and a sense of purpose.

My master plan is always a work in progress, taking into account the ever-changing landscape of life and the new interests that bubble up from inside me. But now I have measurable, meaningful, me-specific goals to constantly motivate and inspire me. My someday dreams no longer feel out of reach. Well, the Oscar still seems pretty far out there. But the future isn’t quite so terrifying anymore. I have a job, a dream, a plan, and I can’t wait to see what the future holds.